As he observed a pro-Hamas convoy of cars roll past his quiet, north Toronto street, blaring Arabic music and Palestinian anthems one night in late 2023, Matthew Taub realized that he was done watching Jewish fear play out from the sidelines.
The Jewish recovery coach and addiction podcaster, who had just self-published a book and was quietly marking 18 years of sobriety, told JNS that he posted on social media, to tens of thousands of followers, that “we have to be unapologetically Jewish.”
That phrase—“Unapologetically Jewish”—became the name of a national advocacy group that he created, challenging Canada’s institutions, police and political class to protect Jews with the same urgency that they show toward other minorities.
In the weeks and months before Oct. 7, 2023, Taub’s life revolved around coaching clients in recovery, running a popular mental health podcast and promoting his book on addiction.
The Hamas attack didn’t trigger him to drink again, he told JNS. “I was triggered to the darkness, and I went dark,” he said. Sleepless nights followed, as did the gnawing sense that Canadian Jews were increasingly exposed.
In mid-December 2023, pro-Hamas protesters gathered at the Highway 401 overpass at Avenue Road, close enough that their slogans and noise carried to Taub’s home. He realized that the conflict had arrived at his doorstep.
Unable to sleep, Taub scrolled through social media feeds in the early morning hours, gathering police files on repeat protest attendees, whose faces he began to recognize each week. He was known in WhatsApp groups as a prolific, behind-the-scenes organizer, but he stayed faceless online when sharing posts and videos.
That changed when he was asked to serve as lead marshal for a Toronto rally for the Israeli hostages in April 2024—his first public, visible role in the country’s burgeoning pro-Israel street movement.
At the rally, he filmed a protester, Razaali Bahadur, delivering what he said were “horrific statements.” The next morning, Taub dug into Canada’s criminal code and thresholds for hate speech. He called Project Resolute, the Toronto Police Service’s hate task force, to ask if Bahadur’s comments were prosecutable.
What followed stunned him, the Toronto native told JNS.
He said he filed a detailed complaint on a Tuesday, and police officers called that Thursday to say that Bahadur had been arrested on hate-crime charges. On Oct. 10, 2025, Bahadur was sentenced to a year in prison and two years probation.
B’nai Brith Canada said Bahadur had yelled “blood libel” things, including “that Jews enjoy killing children and are, as a collective, responsible for killing Jesus Christ.”
Taub thinks the evidence he gathered put the offender on the police’s radar, and that the conviction two months ago was the first in the country under that hate-speech provision, setting what he thinks is a precedent.
‘Get down here and do it’
A stranger, who turned out to be Daniel Tate, founder and executive director of the nonprofit IntegrityTO, contacted Taub and said that he was the only Jew to attend monthly police board meetings.
“Stop doing the online stuff only and get down here and do it,” Tate advised.
In the following meeting, Taub confronted Toronto police board members about how the police service had handled anti-Israel protests and Jewish safety. He did the same at seven more such meetings.
He clipped selections from the video streams of the meetings and posted them on social media, because “nobody was speaking for the Jewish community out loud,” he told JNS.
Almost a year to the day after the first meeting he attended, Taub stood in Ottawa in October to announce the launch of Unapologetically Jewish and to reveal that the new organization had just served a sweeping legal challenge through the Human Rights Tribunal against Toronto, its police board and chief of police, as well as parallel institutions in Montreal and Quebec.
Led in Ontario by Taub’s team and in Quebec by lawyer Jacki Lewis in collaboration with the Tafsik legal network, the complaint alleges systemic racism and antisemitism in the way law enforcement has handled anti-Jewish hate.
“I started Unapologetically Jewish because I’ve got tired of hearing, ‘I’m scared, and I don’t know what I need to do,’” he told JNS.
An important moment for Taub came when he shared a graphic suggesting that anti-Israel and Muslim groups held six times as many meetings with parliamentarians as did Jewish organizations.
As a response, Unapologetically Jewish registered as a non-profit with provincial and federal lobbying status from the outset, so that Taub and his team could walk into offices of parliamentarians and provincial parliamentarians as recognized advocates, rather than as individuals.
The organization is not set up as a charity, which allows Taub to be partisan when necessary and, he says, means that the government can’t cancel it, as it has done with Jewish National Fund and Herut Canada.
Taub’s docket of current files appears to reflect willingness to operate where others hesitate.
For five months, he has been working quietly on a legal response to Davide Mastracci’s “find an IDF soldier” list on the website the Maple, which shares personal information about those listed. He is also responding to its list of Greater Toronto area schools and camps that are linked to Canadian Israelis and Zionists.
“If we’re going to do something, we have to make sure that we’re going to win,” he told JNS. “Because this sets precedence.”
His group is also creating educational materials about anti-Zionism, which he said became more urgent when he learned that Palestinian Families in Canada secured a federal grant of about $70,000 US dollars “purposely to promote anti-Zionism.”
He is also meeting with federal and provincial legislators, working closely with Conservatives who have been “holding the water for Jews for years,” he said. He aims to tell legislators, including those hearing from a Jew for the first time, “what Jews are dealing with, as well as what Western civilization is fighting against.”
In December, Taub traveled to Israel for the first time in 40 years.
Standing at the Kotel at 52—the same age his late father had been when the two visited the Kotel together—he wrapped tefillin and felt what he calls a full-circle moment of generations fighting for Israel.
The trip also reinforced his thinking that Canadians must stop venting privately.
“Every Jew, stop going on Facebook, stop going into the echo chamber, into these WhatsApp groups and complaining,” he said. “Call your MP’s office and go into their office.”
He advises Jews and Israel supporters to come to police board meetings, ask for sit-downs with chiefs and division commanders and refuse to accept the “Palestinian tax,” extra costs and anxiety that Jews bear to protect themselves from a globalized anti-Israel movement.
“We have to be as vocal as we can. We have to call it out,” he told JNS.
